Political correctness

At my mother’s funeral, I told her favourite joke, which most people weren’t expecting to happen.

When I broke my wrist bobsledding, bone sticking through, the only way to cope with the beefy boys at the hospital struggling to haul the hand back into place was to make jokes about it.

I only ever got one bad report card at school and it said, “Inclined to take the more serious aspects of [insert school name of choice] too flippantly”. Always been a problem for me. Which is not to say I’m a fun guy – I don’t think people would go that far but like many, I simply can’t take seriously the things we’re meant to take seriously.

Like political correctness.

The things we should take seriously – look around the blogs, look at OoL, look at the serious posts here, are taken seriously. The things which shouldn’t, e.g. anything coming from the buffoons above or from people who take themselves way too seriously – get sent up on these “politically incorrect days”.

Sure, there’s an edge to them. The constant bellyaching from some sections not only gets on the nerves but actually polarizes people to the point they have to invent the term “political correctness” to both identify and ridicule it. My favourite still remains the council who sent officers to arrest a grandmother for planting flowers on a roundabout in her sleepy village. There are thousands more – see Julia M for pointing out many of those.

Seems to me there are two kinds of people today – those of us who, deeply demoralized about how society is going, frustrated, infuriated, trying to warn people, have gone into a sort of sullen silence or have shut it out or are even defiantly non-cooperating … and then there are people, blissfully unaware of anything wrong, who castigate us for our “insensitivity” and who happily re-elect people like Obama.

These posts are for the former.

It would be nice to make this a regular feature but if it were on Saturday, the comment moderation day here, it would mean nobody could comment until late in the day – well, that’s incorrect in itself, is it not?